Air Force says readiness problems will last through 2023

Jared Serbu, DoD reporter, Federal News Radio

Air Force officials say their current projections show it will be 2023 before the
service fully recovers from serious degradations in combat readiness. Officials
said those problems were not caused entirely by sequestration, but the automatic
budget cuts dramatically increased their severity.

With the relatively-sudden onset of the first round of budget cuts in 2013, the
Air Force grounded 31 squadrons of aircraft for more than three months, deferred
depot maintenance, slashed facility upkeep by half and furloughed the vast
majority of its civilian employees. A subsequent funding boost from Congress
helped matters, the Air Force says. But a year later, only half the air units that
were affected by sequestration have gotten back to the proficiency levels they had
before the cuts kicked in.

Gen. Mark Welsh, chief of staff, Air Force

And Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, said those levels were already
too low.

"The things that affect readiness are much more complex than just flying hour
money each year," he told the House Armed Services Committee Friday. "There are
things like investment in training range space, in threat systems to train against
on those ranges, on live virtual, constructive simulation capabilities as we get
more modern aircraft, where the only place you can re-create a real threat
environment is in a simulator because you can't afford to do it in the real world.
Those things have not been funded over the last 10 to 15 years because we have
been tied up spending money on operations and supporting operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq. It is time for us to get back to full-spectrum training and readiness,
and that's what's going to take us 10 years, to re-build those things that are
behind the power curve, especially as we bring on an airplane like the F-35."

More aircraft on chopping block

The Air Force's readiness recovery would take even longer if it goes back to
sequestration-level budget figures in 2016 and beyond, Welsh and Deborah Lee
James, the Air Force secretary, said in written testimony for Friday's hearing.

The budget submission DoD sent to Capitol Hill this month includes $7 billion for
the Air Force under the White House's Opportunity, Growth, and Security
Initiative, much of which would go toward readiness and modernization. If, as
senior lawmakers already have predicted, Congress declines to approve that fund,
officials say not only would readiness suffer, but the Air Force would have to
eliminate even more fleets of aircraft than it's already planning to, including
the KC-10 refueling tanker.

Welsh and James said the readiness problems may have been masked by the types of
wars the Air Force has been fighting for the past dozen years. In Iraq and
Afghanistan, it was able to dominate the skies without a credible threat from
other air forces. Welsh said the Air Force's preparedness for a high-end fight
with a capable adversary is much lower than it ought to be.

"I'm not comfortable with our current state of readiness to be able to do
anything," he said. "Right now the Air Force's combat coded-squadrons are about 38
percent ready, compared to our standard of fully combat ready. To me, that's
unacceptable."

With or without sequestration, Air Force officials say it's clear that they are
going to need to continue the process of shrinking the service, both in terms of
personnel and in terms of airframes. While it can save some money through
efficiencies and better management, Welsh said that won't cut it.

"It's not going to be $12.8 billion a year, it's just not going to be. And the
only way we keep the Air Force safe and ready to react at whatever size we can be
is by sizing ourselves to a size we can afford to keep that way, which means we
must get smaller if the funding stays low," he said.

A victim of their own success?

The service's current plans call for a reduction of 20,000 airmen and 500 aircraft
over the next five years. Those savings, the Air Force says, need to be plowed
into making sure the remaining force is fully trained and ready to deploy at any
given time.

James said if it's not, the potential consequence will be a greater number of
military casualties.

"The thing that I worry about most, going back to sequester, has to do with the
preparedness and the readiness of the airmen and the military at large, because
what all of us want is we want to make sure they have the training and the
equipment so that they can do their job and stay safe if we send them into harm's
way," she said. "And in some ways because our Air Force has done such a fabulous
job over the last 25 years, we're the victim, a little bit, of our own success
because, thank god, we haven't lost that many people, and thank goodness, there
haven't been that many accidents. But I worry that if the monies get tighter and
tighter and tighter, we may see more fatalities and more lost aircraft. And that's
something that you can't capture until it happens, and I hope it doesn't happen."

The Air Force acknowledges that it's already accepting risk through the
controversial budget decisions it's announced, like the full divestment of the A-
10 attack aircraft fleet, the relocation of missions from certain bases to
different locations and other cutbacks to existing platforms. Welsh said the Air
Force is already unable to meet the requests of global combatant commanders in
several areas, most prominently, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

"ISR, I believe, is clearly the first category that I would maintain capability
in. We do not meet the combatant commanders' requirements today, and as we divest
more, we will not meet them by a wider margin," he said. "And then we have to be
careful about divesting our fighter fleet too much because we are at our
requirement today. We are going to go seven squadrons below our requirement with
this budget, and anything further just puts us farther away from what we have
agreed as a department is required to meet the standing war plans of our combatant
commanders and their standing annual demand."

But Welsh cautioned members of Congress against reflexively protecting programs
that happen to have an impact on their districts. He said the Air Force's budget
was made up of nothing but bad options. And unless Congress changes the existing
budget caps, restoring funding to one program is going to mean reduced readiness
somewhere else.

"We have cut about 50 percent of our planned modernization programs because of the
impact of the sequester-level funding over time. What we have done is funded
things that are absolutely required to make aircraft viable in the near-to mid-
term against the threats that we know are there," he said. "Anything that is nice
to have or should have is off the books for now. We will revisit this every year
as we look at what the threat is doing and what we have to have to keep airplanes
like the F-16 viable against the threat as it emerges. We simply don't have the
money to do it all."